At Cannes Lions 2026, Meta Platforms outlined a series of updates positioning artificial intelligence as a central driver of its advertising ecosystem, from campaign performance optimization to creative production and customer engagement.
The company described AI as a “threshold technology,” noting that progress often appears incremental until capabilities cross a usability line and become broadly transformative. In advertising, Meta said AI systems have already been embedded for years in ranking, delivery, and outcome prediction across its ads infrastructure.
According to a recent analysis cited by the company covering more than one million ad campaigns, advertisers generated an average of $4.13 in revenue for every $1 spent on Meta’s platforms, representing a 25% increase since 2022.¹
AI expansion into creative production
Meta said the next phase of development is focused on advertising creative, where AI tools are increasingly able to generate and iterate ad content at scale. The company announced an end-to-end creative system designed to help marketers produce and test ads more quickly, using performance data to guide iteration.
The system includes a dedicated workspace intended to connect creative and media teams, allowing advertisers to review what is performing, generate new variations based on those results, and test them within a single workflow. Meta said the aim is to reduce reliance on guesswork by tying creative decisions more directly to campaign outcomes.
A “brand memory” capability is also being developed to retain information about a company’s tone, identity, and prior advertising output. This is intended to ensure that AI-generated creative remains consistent with brand identity while enabling higher-volume production.
Meta said the system is being designed to integrate with agency workflows from the outset. As part of this effort, it is working with WPP to integrate tools into WPP’s existing operating environment.
Updates to Ads Manager and global creative tools
The company also detailed upgrades to existing Ads Manager features, including expanded AI text generation that can produce variations embedded directly within image-based creative, not just in headlines or primary text.
Additional language support is being added for creative localization. New tools will enable translations for on-image text and video voiceovers across multiple languages, including Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Dutch, and Turkish.
Meta is also testing a creative approval workflow designed to allow teams to review and approve modifications within the platform, streamlining collaboration between advertisers and stakeholders.
Creator marketing integration
Alongside creative automation, Meta announced a consolidation of its creator-focused advertising tools into a single system called the Meta Creator Marketing Hub. The platform will combine existing creator discovery and partnership ad tools, allowing advertisers to move more directly from identifying creators to activating their content in campaigns.
The company also said it will expand creator discovery to include Facebook creators in addition to Instagram, broadening access to more than five million creators already present in its ecosystem. New filters and content signals—such as product-tagged posts and opt-in advertising permissions—are intended to make creator content more easily usable in paid campaigns.
Business messaging and AI agents
Meta also highlighted growth in AI-driven customer engagement through messaging platforms, including tools designed to turn customer conversations into transactions. The company said more than one million businesses are already using its business AI systems to automate and personalize customer interactions.
At its Conversations event, Meta introduced the Meta Business Agent Platform, which allows enterprises to integrate AI agents into existing systems to manage customer messaging at scale. The system is designed to provide recommendations, support sales, and respond to customer inquiries within messaging apps used by billions of users.
Executives also cited early adoption examples, including retailer Trendyol Group, which reported using AI-driven WhatsApp conversations to convert customer interactions into personalized shopping experiences, including real-time product recommendations and basket building.
Meta framed the updates as part of a broader effort to connect advertising, creator ecosystems, and business messaging into a unified AI-driven system. The company said each interaction—whether a campaign insight, a creator partnership, or a customer conversation—feeds back into future performance improvements, reinforcing a cycle of iterative optimization across its advertising platform.
1 Results from a large-scale study run on Meta’s platforms from April 13 to 20, 2026, with over one million ad campaigns, following the testing framework developed by academics at the University of California at Berkeley and published with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Tadelis et al., 2023.
